Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  Their rings and earrings and bracelets were gold, most of them. They’re the rich ones, she realized with yet another shock to the tottering structure of her assumptions: the ones who can eat enough to put on weight, and who don’t do enough real work to take it off again. She thought of her own new body, and how she’d admired its slimness. A sigh — half rueful laugh — escaped her. Wasn’t that just like her luck? Thin was not In in Carnuntum. The body that had been on the chunky side in California would have been perfect here — and this one, which would have been a killer in the latest in short, tight, and Spandex, was too skinny by local standards. “You can’t win,” she said to herself.

  Aurelia was tugging at her tunic again. “Mother! Mother, can I play?”

  “No,” Nicole said absently. Then, with more focus: “No, there’s no one else your age playing. Come on inside.”

  Aurelia didn’t protest too loudly. She was too excited by the whole adventure to quibble every detail of it. Nicole didn’t need to do anything clever to get her to lead the way. She aimed unerringly toward one of several doorways on the far side of the colonnade, into a room whose function was unmistakable. Two of the walls were bristling with pegs, some draped with items of clothing, others empty. While she stood just inside the doorway, letting her eyes adapt again from sunlight to indoor dimness, a woman slipped out of her tunic and drawers and hung them with her sandals on a peg. A clothed attendant sat on a stool nearby. She was probably supposed to be keeping an eye on things, but she looked half asleep.

  Nicole hadn’t been nude in public since she’d escaped her last high-school p.e. class, for which she was heartily glad. No choice now — and the woman who’d just stripped off wasn’t anything special, either. Defiantly, she pulled her tunic off over her head and yanked down her loincloth. The roof didn’t fall in. The walls didn’t shake with laughter and jeers and cries of Skinny Minnie! and Hey, Horseface! No one took any notice of her at all.

  Aurelia got out of her clothes in one fluid motion. She took it altogether for granted. When in Rome… Nicole thought, and grinned to herself. She wasn’t sure how amused she was, but the irony of the situation was hard to escape.

  She looked down at herself. Sure enough, halfway between her belly button and the edge of her indifferently shaven bush was a nondescript brown mole. No doubt about it: Calidius Severus had seen this body naked — and paid attention to what he’d seen.

  She sighed. Well, so had she, now. And isn’t it about time? Now everybody’s happy.

  Once her eyes adapted, she saw the room was larger than she’d thought at first, and more crowded. A counter stood along the wall at the far end. A second attendant sat there, looking as bored as the first. When Nicole and Aurelia came up to her, she did as she’d done for the woman just ahead of them: she handed Nicole a small, cheap earthenware jar without a stopper and a bronze tool resembling a half-scale sickle.

  What am I supposed to do with this? Nicole wondered. She looked around for the answer. Women sat naked on benches rubbing the stuff from the jars over themselves and then scraping it off with the sickle-like tools. She didn’t see any boys Lucius’ age, or any other age either. A soft murmur of conversation filled the room. A few women sat in pairs and threes, oiling and scraping one another, but most seemed to be there alone and comfortable with it.

  While Nicole took it all in, Aurelia spotted an empty bench and dashed over to lay claim to it. “Come on, Mother!” she called. “You’re so slow today. Will you do me first, Mother, please? I want to go swim in the pool!”

  Nicole picked her way past the benches full of preoccupied women. None of them looked up. Nobody stared or even seemed to notice her. She sat on the bench. Aurelia presented her narrow back and shoulders with an air of someone who knows very well what she is in for.

  Nicole poured a little of the liquid from the jar into the cupped palm of her hand. It was olive oil, as she would have guessed by Julia’s odor fresh from the baths — not so good and, by the scent, not so fresh as what she used in the tavern, but unmistakably olive oil. This is going to get anybody clean?

  One thing was certain: Aurelia had plenty of dirt on which to experiment. Nicole rubbed the oil over her. Aurelia was still at the age where she made a perfect figure one — all vertical lines, no curves whatever. But, though she was slim enough for her ribs to show, she wasn’t scrawny; her arms and legs had plenty of flesh on them.

  “Mother!” she squeaked when Nicole began to scrape off the olive oil. “The strigil tickles!”

  That gave Nicole the name of the tool she was awkwardly wielding. Amazing, how much dirt it took off with the oil. It wasn’t as good as soap would have been, but it wasn’t bad. And she only had to tell Aurelia to stop wiggling about half a dozen times.

  After she’d finished with Umma’s daughter — her daughter now — she swallowed a twinge of revulsion and rubbed oil into her own skin, all over. It had a slimy, slippery feel, like cold cream gone bad, or rancid baby oil. Aurelia begged to help. Nicole handed her the strigil. “Here, you do my legs.” Aurelia was happy to oblige. She did as good a job as one might expect, but grew bored with it and wandered off, humming to herself. Nicole finished the rest, twisting awkwardly to do her back and buttocks. It was truly astonishing how well the oil lifted dirt. Her skin was a couple of shades lighter, and it hadn’t even seen water yet.

  A man’s voice sent her into a purely reflexive jump-and-curl, one arm over her breasts, the other over her privates. The owner of the voice sauntered in beside and a little behind one of the women who’d been exercising in the courtyard, the one who looked astonishingly like Elizabeth Taylor and seemed to have about the same fondness for gold and outsized stones. No diamonds, Nicole was rather disappointed to note. The jewels were huge, but looked rough and barely polished; they ran heavily to garnets and amber.

  The woman skinned her tunic over her rigidly curled and plaited head and strolled, unconcernedly naked, to a vacant bench. She lay on her belly and rested her head on her folded arms, sighing and wriggling her ample buttocks as if to get comfortable on the well-worn wood.

  Her escort was a type Nicole would have recognized in L.A. He’d have been showing off his buff pecs on the beach and trying out for roles on Baywatch, back where Nicole came from. Here he seemed to have settled into the life of a kept studmuffin. He bent over his — mistress? that could be taken several different ways — and began to rub her back. She purred with pleasure. Nobody could miss the sound: it echoed through the room.

  Was he a slave? Was he her slave? Did the baths provide a masseur if you paid extra? Nicole didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. Another one occurred to the lawyerly side of her, one that made her laugh to herself: how many masseurs figured in divorce actions in Carnuntum?

  Aurelia was hopping up and down with impatience. “Mother! Are you asleep? I asked you. Shall we go on the hot plunge now, or the cool one?”

  Nicole shook herself back into line. “The hot one,” she answered promptly. The man’s muscles hadn’t roused her a bit, but her insides went all soft and quivery at the thought of hot water.

  She’d chosen right for Aurelia, too: the child clapped her hands and danced. She skipped ahead through one of two doorways at the far side of the stripping-off room. More women had been going through that doorway than through the other. So it wasn’t just Nicole’s twentieth-century sensibility. In a world in which hot water wasn’t simply to be had at the turning of a tap, people valued it all the more.

  The hot plunge was a small swimming pool, although Nicole had never before gone into a pool with a mosaic of voluptuously naked women on the bottom. Their hair was green — sea nymphs? She sighed as she lowered herself into the water: the temperature was just what she would have wanted in her own tub.

  Some of her pleasure died abruptly. This water hadn’t come from a nice safe heater in a corner of the laundry room. Slaves had hauled wood to feed the fires that heated the pool. There was human sweat in it, and human blo
od, too.

  She couldn’t wallow in liberal guilt every time she made a new move.

  This whole world looked to be a liberal’s nightmare. Too much of it would have been her nightmare if she’d known what it was really like.

  Well, she hadn’t. And she was here, and she was staying here, and that was that. She shut off the corner of her mind that niggled her with guilt, and went back to reveling in the feel of hot water on her skin.

  Aurelia had slid into the plunge a little way down. Now she came paddling up to Nicole, sleek as a fish. “Come here,” Nicole said. “We’re going to do your hair.”

  Aurelia didn’t like getting ducked, not even slightly. She spluttered and squawked and wiggled, none of which did her any good. Nicole was all for empowering children, but not when they had heads full of lice and nits. She did the best job she could with hot water and no shampoo, and had to hope it would be enough.

  When she’d finished tormenting Aurelia, she worked at her own hair and scalp with fingers and nails till she could feel the sting of water in scrapes and scratches. Maybe she’d managed to unload the current cargo of vermin. But even if she had, how long would that last? She’d have to boil all the bedding and all the clothes in her house to have a prayer of banishing them for good — and she had next to no chance that they’d stay banished, not with customers bringing in a whole new shipment five minutes after she’d killed off the last one.

  She could get used to stuffing her underwear with rags several days a month, because the other women in Carnuntum had to do the same. She supposed she could get used to chamberpots, because everybody in Carnuntum used chamberpots. Could she get used to being lousy, because everybody in Carnuntum was lousy? Not — bloody — likely. She scrubbed at her scalp again.

  A woman a few feet away from her stopped trying to rub dirt off an arm that was hardly more than skin wrapped around bones and started coughing: long, wet, racking coughs that made her ladder-thin body shudder and her face turn dusky purple. When at last she seemed able to pause for breath, Nicole saw flecks of reddish froth in her nostrils and the corners of her lips, as if she’d literally coughed up bits of lung.

  Tuberculosis, Nicole thought with a frisson of horror. The horror that followed was too big for a frisson: the woman spat the bloody foam into the water, as casual as if there were no harm in it at all, and went back to trying to get clean.

  Nicole stared transfixed at the swirling, turbid water. The foam had melted right into it. In her mind’s eye, she saw the bacilli floating there, spreading through the plunge, multiplying in that wonderful warm, wet medium. But the germs were too small for her physical eyes to see — for anyone to see. And there were no microscopes here. She remembered that from some class or other, history of science or some such: what a world-shaking discovery that had been. It was still centuries in the future.

  And, because germs were too small for human eyes to see, no one in Carnuntum would believe they were there. Everything she’d seen in the city made her sure of that.

  But that didn’t mean they weren’t there, or that she didn’t know they were there. She grabbed Aurelia, who was doing her best to imitate an otter. “Time to get out,” Nicole said firmly.

  “Oh, Mother! Do you want to go to the sweating room already?” Aurelia sounded like every kid ever born, in any corner of the world.

  It did her no good whatever. “Yes, that’s where we’re going,” Nicole said, though she hadn’t known it was till Aurelia mentioned it. All she’d known was that they were getting out of this pool, and they were doing it this instant.

  Reluctantly, Aurelia did as she was told. Reluctantly, she led the way down a dim stone passageway to the sweating room, though Nicole wasn’t about to let her know she was doing that.

  Outside the room, an attendant stood holding a tray. She held it out as Nicole came up. Haifa dozen leaf-shaped iron blades lay on the tray. “Razor?” she asked.

  Nicole took a razor. She held it cautiously; in California, she’d used an electric shaver, not least because she kept slicing herself with blades. This wasn’t just a slicing tool; if you weren’t careful, you could kill somebody with it. Yourself, for instance.

  Nevertheless, and in spite of her misgivings, she took it. She’d already seen that nobody in Carnuntum went around au naturel. If she wanted to blend in, she had to do what everybody else did.

  And, having seen how bad the lice problem was, she thought she knew why women here shaved everything but their heads. It was a wonder they didn’t shave their heads, too. Maybe she should do that, and start a fashion?

  She wasn’t feeling quite so radical just then. She had chances enough for mayhem as she shaved tender places she’d never tried shaving before with any razor at all, let alone one as potentially lethal as this. The razor was dull, too, and scraped and pulled, and altogether it was not a pleasant process.

  Women might shave everywhere, and for good sanitary reasons, too, but Nicole had already seen that men didn’t even shave their faces. So what was fair about that? Not one thing, she thought with a familiar smolder of anger.

  Hot air hissed and wheezed through pipes in the walls and floor of the sweating room. Nicole wasn’t the only woman shaving there; the sweat that poured from her helped soften the hair and made it easier for the razor not only to cut the hair but to slide across the skin. Nicole still cut herself three or four times, but she wasn’t the only one doing that, either. Small bloody nicks and muttered curses marked other victims of fashion and hygiene.

  Aurelia, being small, was thoroughly baked before Nicole had started to brown. Just as Nicole scraped the last wiry black fuzz from her shin, Aurelia tugged at her free hand. “Let’s jump in the cold plunge now, Mother. I’m melting!” Sweating room… Cold plunge… Sauna, Nicole thought happily. She slid down into the cold pool with a sigh of bliss. Aurelia jumped in, splashing water everywhere. None of the women in the pool complained. Maybe they were willing to let kids be kids. Maybe, like Nicole, they felt too good to complain.

  When the water started feeling chilly instead of wonderful, Nicole climbed out. Aurelia’s lips were blue, and her teeth chattered. Nicole looked around for a towel, but there didn’t seem to be one. The air of the baths at least was warmer than the water they’d been in. They dried as they walked down the hall back to the stripping-off room, and warmed up, too. Aurelia paused halfway down the hall. “I have to go to the latrine,” she said, and ducked through a doorway.

  Nicole, and Umma, too, thank God — or gods — wasn’t one of those women who had to go every ten minutes, or she’d have been in bad shape by now; but her bladder was a little full, and she was curious as to what, if anything, Romans had besides chamberpots. She was envisioning a row of stalls, and in each a malodorous earthen pot, as she stepped from the dim passage into a slightly brighter and much wider space. It was larger than she’d expected, as big as the biggest public restroom she could remember from the twentieth century. It was public, too, no doubt about that. No stalls or partitions separated one hole from another on the long stone bench. You sat down and did what you did in front of everybody, and everybody did her business in front of you.

  Nicole’s bladder clamped up tight and wouldn’t let go. Bashful bladder syndrome sounded like a joke, but it wasn’t. It was as real as this giant privy and the dozen or so women squatting and chattering and doing their business with no more trouble than the men had had pissing in Titus Calidius Severus’ urn.

  Closing her eyes helped. So did the gurgle of flowing water beneath her: houses might not boast running water, but the baths and fountains did. The latrine even had the equivalent of toilet paper: a sponge on a stick in a jar of water. The water was murky. Nicole picked up the sponge with some misgivings, wondering who’d used it last. Nobody else seemed to wonder about that, or care.

  The latrine wasn’t all it might have been, but it was bliss compared to squatting over an earthenware jar. In spite of the sweating room and the cold plunge, the baths weren’t all t
hey might have been either; but again, compared to being filthy they were heaven.

  Aurelia obviously agreed. “That was nice, Mother,” she said as they got back into their clothes, “even if you did scrub my hair too hard.”

  Nicole nodded. “It was nice,” she said. She probably hadn’t got all of Aurelia’s nits, or her own, but she didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about going back to work, either, not after this lovely lazy morning. She sighed and squared her shoulders. “It was nice,” she repeated, “but we’ve got to go home.”

  7

  Nicole was surprisingly glad to see the street she’d come to think of as her own, and the tavern that technically was her own, even after the pleasure of a bath and a romp through the market and the rich indulgence of sticky buns. She’d even got the baker to throw in a basket with a broken handle, no good for displaying his wares but more than good enough for bringing a sampling home. She’d eaten one, too, and Aurelia had had two and was sulking slightly at being denied a third.

  Aurelia scampered through the door ahead of her. She paused, licking sticky fingers and letting her eyes adjust. “Hello!” she sang out to the dark within. “I’m — “

  She stopped. Her eyes made out shapes that came clearer the longer she stared.

  “Oh, hello, Umma,” Ofanius Valens said. He was sitting on a stool. Julia was sitting on his lap. His right arm circled her waist. His left arm had hiked her tunic up to her knees so his hand could slide between her legs. Her tongue was doing something monstrously lewd to his ear.

  Lucius rampaged up and down behind them, joyfully oblivious, or else so used to the sight that he didn’t even think it was worth noticing. He swept his toy sword hither and yon, leaping and stabbing the defenseless air. “Take that, you miserable barbarian! Ha!” He whooped and brandished the sword. “By Jupiter! Right in the guts!” What Julia was doing with Ofanius Valens didn’t bother Lucius.